DAMASCUS, 22 October (IRIN) - More than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing what the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) describes as a "very bleak future" after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved for the coming year.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's new security plan for Baghdad grants military commanders sweeping powers to arrest people and restrict their basic freedoms of speech and association, Human Rights Watch said today. On February 13, al-Maliki issued martial law powers giving military commanders authority to conduct warrantless arrests, monitor private communications, and restrict civil society groups in Baghdad. General Qanbar Hashim, commander of Baghdad operations, announced the decree as part of the Iraqi government's latest plan to curb the escalating civil war in the country.

OSAKA -- An Iraqi journalist and a Japanese human rights activist said the public has a poor idea of the situation in Iraq and warned of an impending health catastrophe as more Iraqis contract cancer from exposure to depleted uranium shells used by the U.S. and Britain.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who helped engineer the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, said Sunday the problems in Iraq are more complex than that conflict, and military victory is no longer possible.

Violence is spreading further across Iraq, as Shi'ite Arab tribes in the south begin to engage occupation forces in new armed resistance.<>"This is not about vengeance," a former Iraqi army officer from Kut, 200 km south of Baghdad told IPS in Baghdad. "People have lost hope in the US-led occupation's promises, and they are thinking of saving the country from Iranian influence which has been supported, or at least allowed by the Multinational Forces."

If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half ... it would be devastating to Iran ... The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funnelling hundreds of millions each year to Shi'ite militias in Iraq and elsewhere."

Oh, I see. Okay to lower oil prices to help the Sunni, but not okay to lower oil prices to help Americans?

Caritas Internationalis and Caritas Iraq say that malnutrition rates have risen in Iraq from 19 percent before the US-led invasion to a national average of 28 percent four years later.

Caritas says that rising hunger has been caused by high levels of insecurity, collapsed healthcare and other infrastructure, increased polarisation between different sects and tribes, and rising poverty.

The United States decided to expand its major detention centers in Iraq after military officials predicted that the ongoing security crackdown in Baghdad will add hundreds or thousands of prisoners to the 17,000 detainees already in U.S. custody, an army spokesman said.

There are indications that the U.S. air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided to Tomdispatch by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes.

Iraq: The Hidden Story shows the footage used by TV news broadcasts, and compares it with the devastatingly powerful uncensored footage of the aftermath of the carnage that is becoming a part of the fabric of life in Iraq.

Images of Iraq dominate our TV news bulletins every night but in this film, Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, questions whether these reports are sugar-coating the bloody reality of war under the US-led occupation

- Warning -

This video contains images that should only be viewed by a mature audience

Fours years of occupation by Anglo-American forces in Iraq was marked in many countries around the world by massive demonstrations this past week. But as the occupation entered another year, Iraqis themselves did not demonstrate. In the country where democracy was promised, a sweeping emergency law, implemented in 2004, bans demonstrations in Iraq without government permission.

"Every three months the government renews this emergency order," says Baghdadi Zahra, "but even if we wanted to go into the streets, it’s too violent to do so. After four years, we cannot even walk down the street without risking death."

You've just got to love this "democracy" we've handed to the Iraqi people!

A series of car bombs have killed at least 133 people in the predominantly Shia neighbourhood of SadrCity in Baghdad. About 30 masked and heavily-armed men also attacked the health ministry in central Baghdad and engaged security guards in a fierce gun battle, trapping 2,000 employees inside the building on Thursday.

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to American and Arab analysts and political observers.

The Iraq war was a boon for Israel's security, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Wednesday, voicing fresh endorsement for a Bush administration sapped by the unpopularity at home of its Middle East policies.

It is high time that that this government stop thinking about what might be 'disasterous' for Israel, and start thinking about the degree to which the war in Iraq continues to be disasterous for our own country.

Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the "Salvador Option" after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse.

U.S. helicopters attacked gunmen holed up inside high-rise buildings in Baghdad on Wednesday in what the U.S. military said was an operation to regain control of a major street cutting through the heart of the city.

The US is fighting to "regain" streets. i.e. the US is no longer in control of Baghdad, and by attacking high-rises, the US has stopped worrying about collateral damage.

An Iraqi security source disclosed Wednesday that the US forces stormed the home of former Iraqi Premier Iyad Allawi who leads the Iraqi list, one of the biggest Iraqi parliament blocs, and arrested eight of his bodyguards.

Hey, wasn't this one of the administration's "good guys" in Iraq?

And you have to wonder just what those US forces were looking for when they ransacked his office.

US President George W Bush has said that the captured former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein should pay the "ultimate penalty" for his crimes.

What crimes? There were no WMDs, Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, did not aid Al Qaeda, was not in defiance of the UN. Iran gassed the Kurds as an act of war.

So what did Saddam do? Lie his people into a war? Yeah, I agree that deserves the death penalty. Spy on his own people? Yeah, if he did that, that deserves the death penalty. Murder his own people without due process? Ever hear of a place called Waco?

Why isn't George Bush Snr being charged? In 1992, a congressional inquiry found that Bush as president had ordered a cover-up to conceal his secret support for Saddam and the illegal arms shipments being sent to Iraq via third countries. Missile technology was shipped to South Africa and Chile, then "on sold" to Iraq, while US Commerce Department records were falsified. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House of Representatives Banking Com mittee, said: "[We found that] Bush and his advisers financed, equipped and succoured the monster . . ."

East Sussex, UK – Saddam Hussein was hanged a week ago, today, for executing 148 people. Yet, even by conservative estimates, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are responsible for hundreds, or thousands, of times more deaths due to their war of aggression — the supreme international crime — in Iraq.

But, while Saddam Hussein is hanged, Bush and Blair remain in power with apparent impunity.

Why the double standard?

By Ben Guyatt, Stoney CreekThe Hamilton Spectator

So Saddam has been executed. He was no hero or humanitarian, but a despot and butcher. However, he is the same man who received U.S. military backing (including chemical weapons) when Iraq fought Iran. He was accused of killing thousands, and his sentence is apt.

My question is this, since there are no weapons of mass destruction and more than 600,000 Iraqi civilian deaths post the U.S. invasion, when will George W. Bush face the same scrutiny? Will he walk the 13 steps?

Do not expect equal justice. The United States is the same country that does not support the International Criminal Court, yet appeals to it when it suits its purpose. The travesty in Iraq proves that those with the military might rule with their false reasoning, fronting vested interests, and are not subject to the same morality and standards which they espouse.

What a joke of a war, a mess, a shame. What a sad world we live in. George W. Bush, this is your legacy. History will not remember you kindly.

Amnesty International has condemned the death sentences handed to Saddam Hussein and two of his senior allies, describing their trial as a "shabby affair, marred by serious flaws".

The London-based human rights group -- which opposes capital punishment -- said the trial should have helped the process of establishing justice and the rule of law in Iraq but was in fact "deeply flawed and unfair".

The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein serves not justice, but the political purposes of the Bush administration and its Iraqi stooges. The manner in which the execution was carried out—hurriedly, secretively, in the dark of night, in a mockery of any semblance of legal process—only underscores the lawless and reactionary character of the entire American enterprise in Iraq.

Everyone now and then I need to go back to the Abu Ghraib pictures . (by the way you can get them in full colors www.albasrah.net. I know some of you readers need the hollywood version and I can assure you will find it there).

The reason why I keep going back to them is not some perverted need to see mutilated male genitals lying next to a tortured bleeding Iraqi. The images actually leave me sleepless.

The real reason I keep going back to them is simply because I need to remind myself of the holocaust the Iraqis are going through under the name of Freedom and Democracy .

A lengthy front page article in Sunday's New York Times reports that after a "sequence that [US] commanders saw as motivated less by a concern for justice than for revenge," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "gave the green light" for Saddam Hussein to be turned over to Iraq, so that prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki could hang the ousted ruler before the year’s end.

3000 soldiers fighting for the American army are dead, and the world is a better place for it. It's hard to understand. I don't really believe it inside myself, but it must be true, because the President said it is so. 3000 dead, and the world is a better place. And no matter how many more die, it's going to be okay, because that's the price we're willing to pay to capture a 75 year old scapegoat and put him in a cage, and kill him.

Newspapers in the Arab world and Israel reflect a combination of cynicism, anger and fear over the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Arab commentators are angry about the timing of the execution on one of the holiest days of the Muslim calendar. Some argue Washington rather than Baghdad dictated the timing and ask why Americans have not been brought to justice for all the Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion.

Commentators in Israel fear that Saddam's death will only lead to an increase in Iranian influence and Shia dominance in the region, posing a greater threat to the country.

I think this was intentional. Watching the cell phone movie of the lynching, it is clear the person holding the cell camera was making no effort to hide it. Yet no guards came over to ask them to put the camera away. I think the leak of the video was done by the direction of either the US or Iraqi government to get the imagery out there but without appearing to officially condone the release themselves.

My Disclaimer:

I present this information in my capacity as a human being, under Common Law, exercising my fundamental God given rights and freedoms. This information represents my private thoughts and beliefs and has been compiled and expressed for educational purposes only. In no way should it be construed as either legal or financial advice. If anyone feels a need to determine the accuracy of this information and the effectiveness of apply any of it, I strongly recommend consulting a competent expert on this subject matter.

Here's a Clue:Look the one place "They" never talk about.Look to your heart, as your competent expert lies within."Seek and you shall find."